Charles Levi, Prospect, 2023-2024, textile appliqué and embroidery. Photo: Charles Levi

Gallery 1

Luddite/Sodomite

Charles Levi

@charleslevi | charleslevi.info

Roomsheet

Luddite/Sodomite is a series of four textile and embroidery installations that investigate the immediate link between labour and textile through a queer lens. Engaging with historic activism of textile labour and similarly arduous, referential queer handmaking processes, this series acquires a diaristic quality that underlines the importance of having a manual and tactile approach; positioning the hand and the manual use of a needle as a necessary, bodily tool for manifesting, consuming and laboriously stitching a distinct queer experience. Focusing on the development of habitual meticulousness introduced through intensive detail and the compartmentalisation of experiential feeling into queer-tinged coded symbols as a narrative form; each work signals to the presence of mental labour in tandem with physical and begins to dissect the process of labour induced catharsis and other emotive components like ambivalence, particularly prevalent in capacious textile practices. By interrogating the slowness and the inevitable catharsis present in embroidered needlepoint, a duality of frustration, arguably a Luddite mentality and contemplative meditation appears within the work. Luddite/Sodomite looks intently and is indebted to The Names Project, AIDS Memorial Quilt as an archival project that is completely indicative of queer labour, symbolic heraldry and celebration, frustrated strenuousness and hardship and cathartic handmaking, making it a crucial referential facet and a desirable objective.

Despite being visually steeped in purposeful ambiguity as a reference to exclusive instances of radical queer coding and flagging, this exhibition is overall, an open, inclusive analysis of a labour-heavy, hand-centric, queer textile practice that exists on an ideological intersection.